In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. You'll learn several techniques for rapidly prototyping (such as Wizard of Oz Prototyping) and evaluating multiple interface alternatives -- and why rapid prototyping and comparative evaluation are essential to excellent interaction design. You'll learn how to conduct fieldwork with people to help you get design ideas. How to make paper prototypes and low-fidelity mock-ups that are interactive -- and how to use these designs to get feedback from other stakeholders like your teammates, clients, and users. Armed with these design-thinking strategies, you’ll be able to do more creative human-centered design in any domain.
This is the first course offered in the interaction design specialization series. Browse through previous capstone projects for some inspiration here: https://medium.com/capstone-projects/capstone-projects-2019-abc67d3f6f26

AC

In a short time I learned a whole lot about Interaction Design. I already feel confident enough to start working as a UI/UX designer. Thank you Prof. Scott Klemmer for his amazing insights.

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Jun 08, 2017

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Great specialization for all who want to get into UX/HCI field, or simply interested in research and ergonomics! This course and specialization helped me to be admitted to Master's in HCI.

From the lesson

Heuristic Evaluation

With this module's videos, we turn our focus from brainstorming and prototyping to the concrete elements of interaction design. We introduce ten key principles of good design -- like the importance of feedback and helping people recover from errors. We call these heuristics -- watch the first video here. I hope you'll find these heuristics practical and applicable to your work both inside and outside class. The lectures discuss these heuristics with a bunch of examples drawn from real-world designs. The goal is to illustrate the many ways that designs can be successful or run into trouble. While heuristic evaluations (HEs) focus on issues that lead to improvement they can also identify areas we think show successful compliance with a heuristic

Taught By

Scott Klemmer

Professor

Transcript

Welcome to the second set of heuristics. In this section, we're going to look at design heuristics for what users can do. First among these is user control and freedom. When I come to a site, is the set of things that I can possibly do clear? Is it large enough to encompass and what I wanted to do and do I know how I can accomplish that? This encompasses a number of things like exits from mistaken choices, the ability to undo and then redo, and not forcing people down fixed paths. So, for example, if I come to an e-commerce site, I probably want to explore before I'm forced to login and add an address, stuff like that. The kind of interface that you want is going to be somewhat dependent on what the task will be. So, something that I only do once every couple of years, maybe set up a router or a printer or other configuration kind of tasks that happen only rarely. In that case, probably a more constrained wizard is going to be a much better choice. Whereas things that happen all the time or where the set of things that I might want to do is larger, there it's going to be important to be able to have a large number of alternative paths available. Also, the more expert somebody is, the more it makes sense to leave the doors wide open. The more novice somebody is for that task in particular, the more that you'll want to constrain things. So, in a good checkout system for example, early on in the process, you want the ability to bounce around, add a bunch of things. When you get into the final part of the funnel, then the option start to shut and you're really encouraged to checkout. I think Amazon as we see here does a really good job of this because even in the checkout stage, you can remove items from your cart before placing the final order. I think checkout funnels are an interesting example of freedom and the balance between the more wizard focused path and the more open-ended path. Because if you have it be too focused, people will just quit, "Oh, I didn't want that. I'm going to give up." Of course, if it's too open-ended people might wander off and do something else forgetting that they were about to checkout. So, all of this as a balance. Here's a good example of providing freedom to users in the context of browsing for airline tickets. What I like about this interface is that there are a number of ways that you can browse through the options. In particular, it's nice to be able to see the other date options that are close to your initial selection. So, for example, if I'm looking for a flight on a particular day and it says well, but if you fly the day before, it is half the price or there are many more options that you have a lot more flexibility. That's nice to know and those previews of alternative channels is something that's sites like this do well. Related to that, the next heuristic that we're going to look at is flexibility. Good interfaces offer flexible and efficient paths for experts. Classic example of this is keyboard shortcuts, that command Copy Paste. If I know the the menu options there, it's a lot easier to do that. One way of accomplishing this flexibility without having novices be lost entirely is to offer good defaults with options. Here's an example the Expedia Hotel search has used, where you can type in any city you want so it's flexible. But the cities that people most commonly go to such as San Francisco, Boston, DC, those are available as a radio button. This flexibility can also take form as ambient information that I can often make better decisions, if I have a little bit of context about what's going on. Here's an example of the busy calendar program where it shows at the top of each day what the weather for that day is going to be. That can be helpful in figuring out whether the bicycle or to drive, whether you need to bring a raincoat, and that just gives you one more bit of information to make good decisions. One powerful way to combat information overload is that we get some help from the tools that we work with and Google's Gmail does this in a number of interesting ways. This is an example of how you might be able to unsubscribe from meetings that if you click on Report spam for something where Google knows how to unsubscribe you, it realizes you don't want messages like that. As opposed to just doing what you literally asked it to do, it says well, you might want to do this. Those kinds of you might want to are really excellent as long as they don't come too often or start to feel like they're getting in the way of what you're trying to do. So, we've seen how an airline site can show you alternate days for better prices or times. We've seen how a calendar site can show you the weather for ambient information. Collaborative filtering or recommender systems are another path for flexibility. So, if you like this particular soda, you may also be interested in this other soda. One caveat to building recommender systems and other algorithmically generated suggestions is that if the algorithms aren't good, then it can be really embarrassing and so on some e-commerce sites you'll see comments, suggestions other algorithmically curated content. That just seems completely random occasionally even offensive to some users, and we have the SAP site which often does a really good job of keeping content that's relevant. However, many of these posts are generic and if you have a specific goal, these more generic posts can be kind of a distraction. So, it's a balance between having content that is relevant but one that's also related to your task. Difficult to do algorithmically requires trial and error and prototyping like so many things in design. Here's a fashion example of how if you'd like to be able to unsubscribe from an email list because you're getting emails too frequently, one option that the site might give you is well, you're getting these e-mails quite frequently from us. Would you still like to get emails just less frequently than before? That's a way of offering users some choice in what they're getting. The third action heuristic that we're going to explore today is recognition over recall. The insight of recognition over recall is bedrock to user interface design. It's a mouthful but what it really means is that what you're able to do is clear based on the interface that you're shown, that you don't have to remember what the red button means or what the something else means. For our research group one day, we got sandwiches that were all wrapped in tin foil and it came with a numerical code and we had the lookup from the code whether it was falafel or chicken or beef or something else. Here it's just a fun silly example from our research meeting. But it's a nice pedagogical example in terms of you can't just grab a sandwich, you need to do a referral to some index system to understand what it means. Many interfaces have this attribute too. Where it can be difficult to know just from looking at it whether what that particular button or control or link will accomplish. This benefit of recognition over recall is one reason that strategies like speaking navigation where links have larger blocks of text as opposed to trying to pare it down. Often taste better in terms of the user experience. So, when you have navigation, it should present enough context that you can understand what's available. That doesn't mean add lots of extra steps. So, a challenge of poor navigation on some sites is that it's broken down into steps that don't necessarily make sense. Like in this movie showtimes example, it's not clear why we need a completely separate path to purchase tickets for today versus for to purchase tickets for tomorrow or a future date. You could imagine in fact we see this in the airline example. Just put the calendar right on the opening, buy tickets page. It can default to a reasonable date which might be today for movie tickets and then you can change it if you want to. One powerful way that you can make people recognize what they're looking at an interface as opposed to having to remember or lookup or actually open it in an interface, is to have good previews. That if you have icons or thumbnails that show the actual content, then you can recognize a particular document. So, this wraps up our video about action. Join me for the next video, where we'll talk about how to provide users with good feedback.

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